SAN FRANCISCO / Nothing magical about city before 1906 quake / Town was smoggy, corrupt and dirty

1906 EARTHQUAKE AND FIRE: LOOKING EAST ON SACRAMENTO STREET TOWARD CHINATOWN. PHOTO BY ARNOLD GENTHE
THIS PRINT MAY NOT BE USED WITHOUT WRITTEN PERMISSION FROM THE PHOTOGRAPHIC ARCHIVES, CALIFORNIA HISTORICAL SOCIETY LIBRARY, 2099 PACIFIC AVE, SF 94109 less

1906 EARTHQUAKE AND FIRE: LOOKING EAST ON SACRAMENTO STREET TOWARD CHINATOWN. PHOTO BY ARNOLD GENTHE
THIS PRINT MAY NOT BE USED WITHOUT WRITTEN PERMISSION FROM THE PHOTOGRAPHIC ARCHIVES, CALIFORNIA HISTORICAL ... more

Photo: ARNOLD GENTHE

Photo: ARNOLD GENTHE

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1906 EARTHQUAKE AND FIRE: LOOKING EAST ON SACRAMENTO STREET TOWARD CHINATOWN. PHOTO BY ARNOLD GENTHE
THIS PRINT MAY NOT BE USED WITHOUT WRITTEN PERMISSION FROM THE PHOTOGRAPHIC ARCHIVES, CALIFORNIA HISTORICAL SOCIETY LIBRARY, 2099 PACIFIC AVE, SF 94109 less

1906 EARTHQUAKE AND FIRE: LOOKING EAST ON SACRAMENTO STREET TOWARD CHINATOWN. PHOTO BY ARNOLD GENTHE
THIS PRINT MAY NOT BE USED WITHOUT WRITTEN PERMISSION FROM THE PHOTOGRAPHIC ARCHIVES, CALIFORNIA HISTORICAL ... more

Photo: ARNOLD GENTHE

SAN FRANCISCO / Nothing magical about city before 1906 quake / Town was smoggy, corrupt and dirty

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Today is the 98th anniversary of the earthquake and fire that destroyed San Francisco, a time to tell old stories about what writer Will Irwin called "The City That Was," a magical San Francisco that probably never existed except in memory.

The old San Francisco, Irwin wrote, was "the gayest, most lighthearted, most pleasure-loving city on the western continent ... a city of romance and the gateway to adventure."

The reality was much different. San Francisco on the eve of the great earthquake was smoggy, dirty and corrupt, a disaster waiting to happen.

The disaster on this day in 1906 was real enough. "The entire city was relentlessly shaken and twisted," in the words of Malcolm Barker, a historian. The sound was "like the roar of the sea," said police Officer Jesse Cook; "like thunder," said Officer Michael Brady; "the sound as of a snarl," said newspaper reporter James Hopper; "a chorus of terrifying noises," said William Cushing, a guest in a hotel.

When the quake was over, the city was badly damaged. Then it caught fire and burned for three days. When it was over, the heart of the city was a smoking ruin.

It was a terrible shock: San Francisco had 400,000 residents. It was the biggest city on the West Coast and eighth largest in the country, and now, it appeared to be dead. People like Irwin and others wrote the city's obituary, and there is a rule in such matters: De mortuis nil nisi bonum -- "Of the dead, say nothing but good."

And so the great myth sprung up -- the old city was a magical place, where the men were all gents and the women were beautiful and, said Irwin, "life was always gay." As time passed, the vanished city became even more mythical, until the reality of those days was paved over with a kind of happy nostalgia.

The day of the earthquake was clear with a crescent moon. The weather is not unusual for spring time, but in the winter especially, San Francisco was clothed in gray smoke. It was an industrial city, and most of the factories were steam-powered, and the steam was produced by burning coal; the many boats in the bay burned coal, and so did the city's furnaces and stoves. "Smoke," said John Leale, a ferry captain, "would hang from one end of the bay to the other."

The old city's air would never pass modern standards. Nor would the streets, covered as they were with the droppings of thousands of horses -- dray horses, horses that pulled carriages, horses that pulled some streetcars. Sewage went directly into the bay. China Basin, site of the Giants baseball park, was "an open sewer, a cesspool that emitted offensive odors, especially at low water," said Fred Klebingat, a ship's captain. The city's fabled reputation for tolerance was still to come. The largest racial minority, the Chinese, were crowded into a colorful slum that tourists found "an exotic adventure full of the mystery of the unknown," according to John Kuo Wei Tchen, who wrote a book about Chinatown.

However, it was not wise for the Chinese to venture into the rest of the city. Tchen quoted an old-timer: "The area around Union Square was a dangerous place for us, you see, especially at nighttime before the quake. Chinese were often attacked by thugs there ..." Chinatown was a world of its own, where the law was enforced by the Chinese tongs, who had their own hired thugs called "highbinders." "No white man, except the very lowest outcasts, lived in the quarter," wrote Irwin.

Chinese could not live outside Chinatown. Selling property to anyone but Caucasians was prohibited by racial covenants in property deeds. Racism was not only widespread, it also was city policy: "We favor the absolute exclusion of all Asiatics -- Japanese as well as Chinese," said the platform of the Workingman's Party, which controlled city government.

Every single elected official was white, and all were male. Women, of course, couldn't vote. Even the reformers had a racist bent. Ex-Mayor James Duval Phelan, who disdained the corrupt politicians, later was elected U.S. senator on an anti-Chinese platform. A street in San Francisco is named for him.

The Workingman's Party, nominally led by Eugene Schmitz, the mayor and an official in the musician's union, was in reality controlled by Abe Ruef, a lawyer, who collected fees for the smallest city services.

One of the most lucrative operations was the sale of licenses and city franchises. The machine was said to control the bribes paid by Chinatown merchants, and fixed liquor licenses for so-called French restaurants, where the lower floors served meals and the upper floors served women.

The machine politicians were also in the vice business. One such operation was so close to city government it was called "The Municipal Whorehouse." The Board of Supervisors, it was said, sometimes took bribes from both sides in controversial cases: The sore losers complained that the crooks were so crooked they wouldn't even stay bought. The city fathers were so crooked they would eat the gilded paint off the walls, according to Ruef, who ought to have known.

The fabled Barbary Coast, now celebrated by a historic walk through the city, was famous throughout the world for its depravity. It had drugs, prostitution and every kind of vice. Even Irwin, who found it colorful, thought it "a loud bit of hell." The old city of memory was fairly new: the Flood Building on Market Street was only 2 years old at the time of the earthquake.

The St. Francis Hotel had been opened in 1904, the new Fairmont Hotel on Nob Hill was so new it hadn't opened yet. The now-venerable Ferry Building was only 8 years old in 1906; the Emporium Store on Market Street was 10 years old. Though San Francisco had been rocked by a big earthquake only 38 years before, building codes were poorly drawn and enforcement was lax. The city's premier municipal building, an imposing City Hall that had taken 15 years to build and cost hundreds of millions in modern dollars, collapsed in seconds in 1906.

Much of the rest was poorly built. The city's Latin Quarter in North Beach and Telegraph Hill was a collection of shacks, and the houses even in its better districts were crowded together. "It wasn't planned," said Gladys Hansen, a historian who has written a book about the earthquake and fire. "Many downtown buildings were ugly, and the insurance companies warned it was a city ready to burn down."

Which is exactly what happened.

Dennis Sullivan, the city fire chief, warned about the danger many times, but he was ignored by the city fathers; in any case, he was mortally injured by falling rubble when the earthquake came. The Fire Department, now leaderless, found the water pipes all had broken, and there was no way to put out the fire. There was no plan, either, and 28,188 buildings were destroyed.

The U.S. Army dynamited many buildings trying to stop the firestorm, but it died out only after the wind changed. Many insurance companies paid only part of the claims due. Some paid nothing at all; only a handful paid in full. In some ways, Hansen thinks, the 1906 quake and fire were good for the city. It exposed many problems -- graft and greed. "It shook them up," she said.

She thinks the city that rose from the ashes might have been better. In her own time, before and after World War II and until just recently, San Francisco was a special place. "San Franciscans cared about their city," she said.